Re: Supported Hardware ?
Hi,
On Wed, 26 Oct 2016, Erik Brangs wrote:
> On 26.10.2016 17:57, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > what hardware details are actually important for you?
>
> (Non-)Atomicity of access to 32 bit or 64 bit memory words, memory
> barriers and implemented floating point instructions.
>
> There's an existing backend that I'd like to refactor and possibly
> improve. I know that it mostly works on e500mc because I briefly had
> access to a machine with that core. Apparently it also worked on old PPC
> Macs but I don't have any experience with those.
Well, in that case I think your best and cheapest bet is still an old dual
CPU PPC Mac off eBay or something. Apple sold a plenty of those from the
400-ish Mhz range up to dual 1.25Ghz G4s. Plus there were a bunch of dual
CPU accelerators from 3rd parties, ranging up to 2Ghz.
Everymac.com has a list of all PPC models, so it's easy to search for dual
CPU ones (marked DP, usually).
And about being a Mac, yes, they have a few quirks, but after you
installed a bootloader, you can just boot Linux directly, have an ext4 (or
so) partition, and from then on everything is just a Linux environment,
without a lot of note that you run this on a Mac. You don't even need OSX
installed. They're also the best supported platforms by distros still
doing PPC versions, simply because of the number of them sold and still
being out there.
And they still accept standard peripherals, which are older, but readily
available on eBay and such places. A while ago there were even companies
specializing on refurbished Macs, with some warranty, not sure they're
still there tho', after this much time, or they still do PPC systems...
Charlie
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